Have there been any US paratroop drops behind enemy lines since WW II?
The 101st and 82nd divisions are still around and very active but I think they typically don’t use mass drops like they used to. 101st mostly uses helicopters now.
I believe recent wars have not really been that favorable to airborne drops except maybe in small numbers.
Yes, somewhat active.
These don’t seem to include any special forces operations that may have used parachute drops. I assume the above list is only the stuff cleared/declassified for public information release.
Well, in Grenada, the Rangers actually did the drop, but the 82nd came in on planes shortly thereafter (like minutes, I believe).
The 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team performed two mass jumps in Korea as an entire unit behind enemy lines at Sukchon-Sunchon and at the Munsan-ni Valley.
The 75th Ranger Regiment and 1st Brigade of the 82nd jumped during Operation Just Cause (Panama).
Ten Sheridan’s of C/3-73 Armor were attached to 1st BDE and dropped as well. That was the Sheridan’s only combat drop. Two were lost in the process (cite and picture )
There have been a few combat drops early on in Iraq and Afghanistan. Certainly not on the WWII scale.
Ooops no picture because the link I had for one was dead. Didn’t edit it out before posting.
There were a ton in Vietnam and Korea as well.
There have been thirty-eight. Simulated.
Operation JUNCTION CITY in 1967 involved a operational mass drop - the only one in the Vietnam war.
Note that wars were never favorable to large-scale parachute operations. Historian John Keegan discusses this in The Second World War. Keegan looks at the four great parachute operations of the war and their results:
Operation Merkur, the German descent on Crete: although ultimately successful, the casualties to the expensively-trained airborne units were ruinous.
The Normandy drop (D-Day): disorganized and of limited effectiveness.
Operation Market-Garden, the Arnhem drop: total disaster.
Operation Varsity, the Rhine crossing: high casualties in a success overshadowed by other operations.
Keegan concludes that military planners turned away from parachute operations after these four painful experiences. The high cost in resources and the heavy loss of elite troops was not justified by the mixed-at-best results.
The interesting thing about that list is there’s such a variety of targets: urban, desert, mountain. What advantage was there by parachuting rather than helicopter assault?
Trans-Atlantic flights are easier in planes than helicopters.
Strictly speaking, almost nothing on that list meets the OPs requirements: a mass drop by US airborne forces. The only US airdrops that meet anything like those requirements are the two combat drops by the 187th Airborne RCT in Korea where the entire regiment (~3,000 men including light armored vehicles and artillery) made mass drops behind enemy lines and to a much lesser degree in terms of opposition encountered the two drops in Panama during Operation Just Cause where in one case 1st Brigade task force of the 82nd Airborne Division made a mass drop at Tocumen International Airport and in the other two battalions of the 75th Ranger Regiment dropped at Río Hato Airport. In both cases they were taking an airport from a much weaker enemy in a very small country that the US had total control of the air over, so exactly how much they were really dropping “behind enemy lines” is debateable.
Operation Junction City in Vietnam only involved the air drop of elements of one battalion of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, with the total number dropped only being 845. As bump noted the drop in Grenada was only made by a small force of Rangers with the members of the 82nd flying in and de-planeing on the ground; they didn’t jump. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was very similar, the actual combat jump was only made by 954 soldiers of the 173rd Airborne Brigade. The other 1,200 members of the 173rd and their vehicles were flown in to the now secured airport over the next 96 hours.
Nobody’s going to drop a division an ocean away from the main force.
If an entire division is dropping, they are the main force! But I’m not really sure what you’re getting at. The question was, “What advantage was there by parachuting rather than helicopter assault?” The answer is almost always one of logistics, especially time and distance and number of troops. When 173rd parachuted into Iraq, they took off from an airbase in Italy. That flight was well over 1800 miles. Do you think that is going to be easier in a helicopter? What helicopter can make that flight without refueling? Plus, how many helicopters would it have taken to move 900 soldiers? Keep in mind, if the flight takes longer than 4 hours, the paratroopers need to do an in-flight rig. That means you have to cut the carrying capacity almost in half so that they have room to don their parachutes during the flight.
Look at Operation Just Cause. Planes left from several locations throughout the United States carrying paratroopers into Panama. Even the closest unit that went in from Ft. Benning was around 1600 miles away. You want to try that in helicopters?
Annually the US Army practices jumping into Taiwan and Australia. A few hundred paratroopers board their planes in the United States and jump out on the other side of the planet. That’s not going to happen in helicopters.
Operation Urgent Fury had paratroopers from Ft Bragg, NC and Hunter Army Airfield, GA dropping into Grenada 2,000 miles away.
The first airborne insertion into Afghanistan that kicked off the ground assault there was onto Objective Rhino near Kandahar. That was 200 paratroopers flying out of a small island off the coast of Oman. Even that short flight was over 1000 miles and involved flying over Pakistan. Much easier to pull off in a couple airplanes instead of several dozen helicopters.
Arguably, some of the recent operations may have been possible using a helicopter assault instead of airborne operation, so the advantages may not be as immediately obvious. Some of it may just come down to the fact that if you are going to use airborne soldiers, they are going to want to jump in. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. A unit that trains to jump and plans all of their training around jumping and has experience coordinating the appropriate air assets and conducting airborne operations is going to find it easier to conduct an airborne operation than air assault.
Yessir, as stated by several member here, the last “large scale” (relativley) combat jump was by the 173rd Airborne Brigade with 996 men.
Video of Jump
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SINKAXFcMI8
Of course there have also been smaller scale Special Operating Forces jumps, but most of the American public will not hear about those.
Alien?
I read somewhere that for the Normandy invasion, there were 25% loses of paratroopers. That’s just from the time the C-47s left the runway in England to the able bodied troopers taking off their parachutes in France.
The drops were scattered all over creation (the average error from the intended drop zone was 2 miles, some dropped 25 miles from their intended drop zone) but the casualties were no where near that bad. Total casualties on D-Day
That’s out of 17,000 paratroopers and glider troops, so its 14.7% for the entire day, after taking their chutes off and engaging in combat. The original intention had been to pull them out of the line once contact had been made with the rest of the ground forces in order to preserve their strength, but mixed and poor initial performance from the some of the green US infantry divisions necessitated keeping both airborne divisions in the line until the end of June by which point they had suffered 1,003 killed, 2,657 wounded and 4,490 missing.